What is the unsaid job description of being a para?

So, Beck's "Loser" popped on the radio on my drive home today, and the quasi-meditative background sound that looped through the song made me feel rather philosophical.

There's a question that I hear from other paraprofessionals, but never from people from outside the field.  "What exactly is my job, here?"  I mean, if an outsider were asked what we do, it would be simple:  "They work with people with special needs (person-first language notwithstanding)".  Yet, for us, the people who do that work, who see these people AS people, and not merely objects of inconvenience, we have to, at points, sit and wonder:  This person is a human being?  What am I doing here?

And the answers I get always volley from cynic to optimist.  At one point the conversation starts to lead to a place where we're these wondrous teaching translators, working to provide an answer to a specific person's subjective reality.  On the other, we are these barbaric jailors, grimly locking away the things that makes a person socially abnormal, in a world where we rapidly realize, normalcy doesn't even exist.  There's a sort of dance about it too; at some points in the conversation one person might be the obvious cynic, and then the other person makes a comment which WAY overpasses the first person's cynicism, and so the first person plays the role of the optimist.

By the end of the conversation, there's a lull, not usually because either person has run out of things to say, but rather that both sides don't really have much energy to continue.  I mean, it is both, isn't it?  Yeah, we go out of our way to make it so that our guys can actively and independently participate in the world around them, but almost always this comes at the cost of the individuality of the person.  I mean, whatever little quirks that we don't find to be at all offensive, and indeed, perhaps endearing, we realize that when they end up with their neuro-typical peers, or at a workplace, that even these need to be scrubbed in order to present acceptable or professional.

And honestly, it kind of kills us a bit every time we have to do it.  I mean, the reasons that these conversations begin is rarely because people got caught up in the fly beats of 90's Beck on the radio.  It's the sort of conversation that occurs after we have to make the hard call of determining whether to try and engage our wards socially, or let them stay otherwise happy, but alone.  It's the sort of thing that a person looks back on their efforts and wonders whether or not any of it was worth a damn.  And, despite how that sounds, it's actually sort of depressing to consider!

I'm gonna be perfectly honest.  I'm not writing this post to give you an answer to this question, nor am I really asking it to the crowds, to find an answer myself.  What is the unsaid job description of being a paraprofessional?  I don't know that there's a good answer, cynically or optimistically.  We do what we can, as best as we can, with what we have available.  We make it until tomorrow.  Then we wake up and do it again.  It's a sort of non-answer that politically avoids the harsher truths that you would naturally bring up when considering the question honestly.

But what can I say?  I mean, society kind of blows.  How many things did you have to give up about yourself growing up to become who you are today?  How many funny little things do your parents remember about you, that you've long since grown past?  What does it take to grow up, and get a job, and pay the rent, and survive as independent people?  The fact is, as socially aware as we try to be ourselves, as we try to make the world around us...  As conscious as all the advertisement by all the advocacy campaigns of every individual identity are, we still judge, and worry about being and appearing normal.  The workplaces still don't want to deal with non-conformity.  The kids at schools still make fun of the odd man out.

It could be worse.  Gorillas rip each other apart when they have a deformity or disfiguration.  We could be like one of the many Spartan-like cultures which leave any child born somehow "different" on a hillside.  But when you stop and think about it, no matter how crappy the alternative could be, it still sucks that we're not somehow better.

I can't get onto this blog and give you an answer, but I can say: I've been there before, and I hear you.